Every time Viv and her father came out of the prison they had to stop for a minute or two so that Mr Pearce could rest, could get out his handkerchief and wipe his face. It was as though the visits knocked the breath from him. He’d gaze back at the quaint, grey, medieval-looking gate like a man who’d just been punched. ‘If I’d ever thought,’ he’d say, or, ‘If someone had told me.’
‘Thank God your mother’s not here, Vivien, to have to see this,’ he said today.
Viv took his arm. ‘At least it’s not for much longer.’ She spoke clearly, so that he would hear. ‘Remember what we said, at the start? We said, “It’s not for ever.”’
He blew his nose. ‘That’s right. That’s true.’
They started to walk. He insisted on carrying her satchel for her, but she might as well have been holding it herself: he seemed to lean against her with all his weight, and every so often he let out his breath in a little puff. He could have been her grandfather, she thought. All this business with Duncan had made an old man of him.
The February day had been cold, but bright. Now it was quarter to five and the sun was setting: there were a couple of barrage balloons up and they were the only things that still caught the light, drifting pinkly, vividly, in the darkening sky. Viv and her father walked along towards Wood Lane. There was a café, close to the station, where they usually stopped. When they reached it today, however, they found women there whose faces they recognised: the girlfriends and wives of men in other parts of the prison. They were freshening up their make-up, peering into compacts; laughing their heads off. Viv and her father walked on to another place. They went in, and bought cups of tea.
This café was not so nice as the other. There was one spoon, to be used by all, tied to the counter by a piece of string. The tables were covered with greasy oilcloths, and the steamed-up window had patches and smears where men must have leant their heads against it as they lolled in their chairs. But her father, Viv thought, saw none of this. He still moved as though winded or bewildered. He sat, and lifted his cup to his mouth, and his hand was shaking: he had to dip his head and quickly sip at the tea before it should spill. And when he rolled himself a cigarette the tobacco fell from the paper. She put down her own cup and helped him pick up the strands from the table—using her long nails, making a joke of it.
He was a little calmer after his smoke. He finished his tea, and they walked together to the Underground, going quickly now, feeling the cold. He had a long journey home to Streatham, but she was going, she said, back to work at Portman Square—working extra hours to make up for the ones she’d taken off in order to visit Duncan. They sat side by side in the train, unable to talk because of the roar and rattle of it. When she got out at Marble Arch he got out with her, to say goodbye on the platform.
The platform was one that was used as a shelter in the night. There were bunks, buckets, a litter of papers, a sour uriney smell. People were already coming in, kids and old ladies, settling down.
‘There we are,’ said Viv’s father, as they waited. He was trying to make the best of things. ‘It’s another month done, I suppose.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘And how did you think he was looking? Did you think he was looking all right?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, he looked all right.’
‘Yes…And what I always think to myself, Vivien, is this: at least we know where he is. We know he’s being looked after. There’s plenty fathers can’t say that of their sons in wartime, can they?’
‘No.’
‘There’s plenty fathers would envy me.’
He took out his handkerchief again and wiped his eyes. But his look grew bitter rather than sad. And after a moment he said, in a different voice, ‘God help me, though, for talking ill of the dead; but it ought to be that other boy in there, not Duncan!’
She pressed his arm, saying nothing. She saw the anger in him, tightening, then draining away. He let out his breath, patted her hand.
‘Good girl. You’re a good girl, Vivien.’
They stood without speaking until another train roared in. Then, ‘Here you are,’ she said. ‘Go on, now. I’ll be all right.’
‘You don’t want me to walk you up to Portman Square?’
‘Don’t be daft! Go on, look. And give my love to Pamela!’
He didn’t hear her. She watched him board but, the windows being all blacked out, when he moved further in to find a seat she lost sight of him. But she didn’t want him to glimpse her rushing away: she waited for the doors to close and the train to start up, before moving off herself.
Then, however, it was as though she became a different girl. The slightly exaggerated manner she had to adopt when speaking to her father—the mouthing, the gestures—fell away. She was suddenly neat, smart, guarded: she looked at her watch and went quickly, her heels clicking on the concrete floor. Anyone watching her, after hearing the conversation she’d just had, would have been baffled: for she didn’t head for the steps that would have taken her up to the street; she didn’t even glance that way. Instead she went purposefully across to the westbound platform and waited there for a train; and when the train drew in, she got on it and travelled back in the direction she’d just come from. And at Notting Hill Gate she changed to the Circle Line, and rode to Euston Square.
She didn’t have to go back to work, after all. She was going to a hotel in Camden Town. She was meeting Reggie. He’d sent her the address of a place and a rough sort of map, and she’d memorised it, so that now, when she left the train, she could go quickly and not hang about. She was dressed in her sober office clothes and a navy mackintosh and scarf, and the day had darkened properly. She moved like a shadow through the blacked-out streets around Euston, heading north.
These streets were full of small hotels. Some were nicer than others. Some were not nice at all: they looked like places that tarts would use; or they had refugee people in them, families from Malta, Poland, Viv wasn’t sure where else. The one she wanted was in a street off Mornington Crescent. It smelt of gravy dinners and dusty carpets. But the woman at the desk was all right. ‘Miss Pearce,’ she said, smiling, looking at Viv’s identification card, then going through her book for the reservation. ‘Just passing through? That’s right.’
For there were a thousand reasons, these days, why a girl should spend a night on her own in a London hotel.
She gave Viv a key with a wooden tag on it. The room was a cheap one, up three flights of creaking stairs. There was a single bed, an ancient-looking wardrobe, a chair with cigarette burns, and a little wash-basin in the corner that was coming away from the wall. A radiator, painted over and over with different kinds of paint, gave off a tepid heat. On the bedside table was an alarm clock, fastened down with a length of wire. The clock said ten past six. She thought she had thirty or forty minutes.
She took off her coat, and opened her satchel. Inside were two bulky buff Ministry of Food envelopes, marked Confidential. One held a pair of evening shoes. In the other was a dress, and real silk stockings. She had been worried about the dress all day, because it was crêpe and easily creased: she took it carefully from the envelope and let it hang from her hands, then spent a few minutes tugging at it, trying to flatten out the folds. The stockings she had worn and washed many times; there were patches of darning, the stitches tiny and neat, like fairy-work. She ran them over her fingers, liking the feel of them, looking for faults.
She wished she could bathe. She thought she could feel the sour prison smells still clinging to her. But there wasn’t time for it. She went down the hall and used the lavatory, then came back to her room and stripped to her brassière and knickers, to wash herself at the little basin.
There was no hot water, she discovered: the tap went round and round in her hand. She ran the cold, and splashed her face, then lifted her arms and leant to the wall and rinsed her armpits—the water running down to her waist, making her shiver, wetting the carpet. The towel was yellowy-white and thin, like a baby’s napkin. The soap had fine grey seams in it. But she’d brought talcum powder with her; and she dabbed scent, from a little bottle, on her wrists and throat and collarbones, and between her breasts. When she put on the flimsy crêpe dress, and replaced her lisle winter stockings with the flesh-coloured silk ones, she felt as though she was in her nightie, light and exposed.
So she went a little self-consciously down to the bar, and got herself a drink—a gin and ginger—to settle her nerves.
‘It’s only one each, miss, I’m afraid,’ the barman said; but he made the measure, it seemed to her, a large one. She sat at a table, keeping her head down. It was nearly dinner-time, and people were just beginning to come in. If some man were to catch her eye, drift over, insist on joining her, it would spoil everything. She’d brought a pen and a piece of paper with her, and now spread the paper out. She actually started to write a letter to a girl she knew, in Swansea.
Dear Margery—
Hello there, how are you getting along? This is just a word to let you know that I am still alive, despite Hitler doing his best, ha ha. Hope things are a bit quieter where you are—
He arrived at just after seven. She’d been glancing slyly over at every man who had appeared, but had heard a step and, for some reason not thinking it was his, looked up unguardedly: she met his gaze as he crossed the doorway, and blushed like crazy. A moment later she heard him talking with the woman at the desk—telling her that he was meeting someone, a man. Would they mind if he waited? The woman said they wouldn’t mind it one little bit.
He came into the bar, had a joke with the barman: ‘Just pour me a drop of that stuff there, will you?’—nodding to one of the fancy bottles that were kept, for show, on the shelves behind the counter. In the end he got gin, like everyone else. He brought it to the table next to hers and set it down on a beer-mat. He was dressed in his uniform, wearing it badly, as he always did, the jacket looking as though it was meant for someone half a size bigger. He plucked at his trousers, and sat, then got out a packet of service cigarettes and caught her eye.
‘How do you do?’ he said.
She changed her pose, drew in her skirt. ‘How do you do?’
He offered the cigarettes. ‘Care to smoke?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘You won’t mind if I do?’
She shook her head, and went back to her letter, though with the nearness of him, the excitement of it all, she’d lost the sense of what she’d been writing…After a second she saw him tilt his head: he was trying to read the words over her shoulder. When she turned to him, he straightened up as if caught out.
‘Must be the hell of a fellow,’ he said, nodding to the page, ‘to get all that.’
‘It’s a lady-friend, actually.’ She sounded prim.
‘Well, my mistake.—Oh, now don’t be like that!’ For she’d folded the paper, begun to screw together the pen. ‘Don’t leave on my account, will you?’
She said, ‘It’s nothing to do with you. I’ve got an appointment.’
He rolled his eyes, then winked at the barman. ‘Why do girls always say something like that when I appear?’
He loved all this. He could spin it out for hours. It only put her on edge: she thought they must be like a pair of painful amateur actors. She was always afraid she’d start laughing. Once, in another hotel, she had started laughing; and that had made him laugh; they’d sat there, giggling like kids…She finished her drink. This was the worst part. She picked up her paper, her pen, her bag, and—
‘Don’t forget this, miss,’ he said, touching her arm and taking up her key. He held it out to her by its flat wooden tag.
She blushed again. ‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t mention it.’ He straightened his tie. ‘That’s my lucky number, as it happens.’
Perhaps he winked at the barman again, she didn’t know. She went out of the bar and up to her room—so excited now, she was practically breathless. She put on the lamp. She looked in the mirror and recombed her hair. She began to shiver. She’d got chilled from sitting in the bar in her dress: she put her coat over her shoulders and stood at the tepid radiator, hoping to warm up, feeling the goose-pimples rising on her bare arms and trying to rub them away. She watched the tethered alarm clock, and waited.
After fifteen minutes there was a gentle tapping at the door. She ran to open it, throwing off the coat as she went; and Reggie darted inside.
‘Jesus!’ he whispered. ‘This place is crawling! I had to stand about for ages on the stairs, pretending to tie my shoelaces. A chamber-maid passed me, twice, and gave me the hell of a funny look. I think she thought I was peeping through keyholes.’ He put his arms around her and kissed her. ‘God! You glorious girl, you.’
It was so wonderful to stand in his arms, she felt suddenly almost light-headed. She even thought, for an awful moment, that she might cry. She kept her cheek against his collar, so that he shouldn’t see her face; and when she could speak again what she said was: ‘You need a shave.’
‘I know,’ he answered, rubbing his chin against her forehead. ‘Does it hurt?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you mind?’
‘No.’
‘Good girl. To have to start messing about with razors, now, would just about kill me. God! I had a bloody awful time of it getting down here.’
‘Are you sorry you came?’
He kissed her again. ‘Sorry? I’ve been thinking of this all day.’
‘Only all day?’
‘All week. All month. For ever. Oh, Viv.’ He kissed her harder. ‘I’ve missed you like hell.’
‘Wait,’ she whispered, pulling away.
‘I can’t. I can’t! All right. Let me look at you. You look beautiful, you fabulous girl. I saw you downstairs and, I swear to God, it was all I could do to keep my hands off you; it was like torture.’
They moved further into the room, hand in hand. He stood rubbing his eyes, looking about. The bulb in the lamp was dim; even so, he saw enough, and made a face.
‘This joint is a bit of a hole, isn’t it? Morrison said it was OK. I think it’s worse than the Paddington one.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said.
‘It’s not all right. It breaks my heart. You wait till after the war, when I’m back on a proper man’s pay. It’ll be the Ritz and the Savoy then, every time.’
‘I won’t care where it is,’ she said.
‘You wait, though.’
‘I won’t care where it is, so long as you’re there.’
She said it almost shyly. They looked at each other—just looked at each other, getting used to the sight of each other’s faces. She hadn’t seen him for a month. He was stationed near Worcester, and got to London every four or five weeks. That was nothing, she knew, in wartime. She knew girls with boyfriends in North Africa and Burma, on ships in the Atlantic, in POW camps. But she must be selfish, because she hated time, for keeping him from her even for a month. She hated it for making them strangers to each other, when they ought to be closest. She hated it for taking him away from her again, when she’d just got used to him.
Perhaps he saw all this in her face. He pulled her to him, to kiss her again. But when he felt the press of her against him he moved back, remembering something.
‘Hang on,’ he said, unbuttoning the flap of his jacket pocket. ‘I’ve got a present for you. Here.’
It was a paper case of hair-grips. She’d been complaining, when she saw him last, about how she had run out. He said, ‘One of the boys at the base was selling them. It’s not much, but—’
‘They’re just the thing,’ she said shyly. She was touched by his having remembered.
‘Are they? I thought they would be. And look, don’t laugh.’ He’d coloured slightly. ‘I brought you these, too.’
She thought he was going to give her cigarettes. He’d produced a bashed-up packet. But he opened it very carefully, then took hold of her hand and gently tipped the contents out into her palm.
They turned out to be three wilting snowdrops. They fell in a tangle of fine green stems.
He said, ‘They’re not broken, are they?’
‘They’re beautiful!’ said Viv, touching the tight bud-like white flowers, the little ballerina skirts. ‘Where did you get them?’
‘The train stopped for forty-five minutes, and half of us blokes got out for a smoke. I looked down and there they were. I thought—Well, they made me think of you.’
She could see he was embarrassed. She pictured him stooping to pick the flowers, then putting them into that cigarette packet—doing it quickly, so that his friends wouldn’t see. Her heart seemed too big, suddenly, for her breast. Again she was afraid that she might cry. But she mustn’t do that. Crying was stupid, was pointless! Such a dreadful waste of time. She lifted a snowdrop and gently shook it, then looked at the basin.
‘I should put them in water.’
‘They’re too far gone. Pin them to your dress.’
‘I haven’t got a pin.’
He took up the hair-grips. ‘Use one of these. Or—Here, I’ve a better idea.’
He fixed the flowers to her hair. He did it rather fumblingly; she felt the point of the grip cut slightly into her scalp. But then he held her face in his swarthy hands, and looked her over.
‘There,’ he said. ‘I swear to God, you get more beautiful every time I see you.’
She went to the mirror. She didn’t look beautiful at all. Her face was flushed, her lipstick smeared by his kisses. The stems of the flowers had got crushed by the grip and hung rather limply. But the white of them was vivid, lovely, against the black-brown of her hair.
She turned back to the room. She oughtn’t to have moved away from his arms. They seemed to feel the distance, suddenly, and grew shy with each other again. He went to the armchair and sat down, unfastening the top two buttons of his jacket and loosening the collar and tie beneath. After a little silence he cleared his throat and said, ‘So. What do you want to do tonight, glamour girl?’
She lifted a shoulder. ‘I don’t know. I don’t mind. Whatever you like.’ She just wanted to stay here with him.
‘Are you hungry?’
‘Not really.’
‘We could go out.’
‘If you want to.’
‘I wish we had some drink.’
‘You’ve just had one!’
‘Some whisky, I mean.’
Another silence. She felt herself getting chilly again. She moved to the radiator, and rubbed her arms, as she had before.
He didn’t notice. He’d gone back to looking around the room. He asked, as if politely, ‘You didn’t have any trouble finding this place?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it was easy.’
‘Were you working today, or what?’
She hesitated. ‘I went to see Duncan,’ she said, looking away, ‘with Dad.’
He knew about Duncan—at least, he knew where Duncan was. He thought he was in for stealing money. His manner changed. He looked at her properly again.
‘Poor baby! I thought you seemed a bit blue. How was it?’
‘It was all right.’
‘It’s stinking, you having to go to a place like that!’
‘He doesn’t have anyone else, except Dad.’
‘It’s lousy, that’s all. If it was me, and my sister—’
He stopped. There had come the bang of a closing door, amazingly close; and now voices started up, on the other side of the wall. A man’s and a woman’s, slightly raised, perhaps in argument: the man’s sounding most clearly, but both of them muffled, fitful, like the squeals made by a cloth as it polished a table.
‘Hell!’ whispered Reggie. ‘That’s all we need.’
‘Do you think they can hear us?’
‘Not if we’re quiet; and not if they carry on like that. Let’s hope they do! The fun’ll start if they decide to kiss and make up.’ He smirked. ‘It’ll be like a race.’
‘I know who’d win,’ she said at once.
He pretended to be hurt. ‘Give a fellow a chance!’
He looked her over, in a new sort of way, then held out his hand and said, in a coaxing voice, ‘Come here, glamour girl.’
She shook her head, smiling, and wouldn’t go to him.
‘Come here,’ he said again; but she still wouldn’t go. So he rose, and reached for her fingers, and drew her to him—pulling at her arm as a sailor pulls on a rope, hand over hand. ‘Look at me,’ he murmured as he did it. ‘I’m a drowning man. I’m a goner. I’m desperate, Viv.’
He kissed her again, lightly enough, at first; but then, as the kiss went on, they both grew serious, almost grim. The stir of feelings which, a moment before, had been gathered about her heart, expanded further. It was as if he were drawing all the life of her to the surface of her flesh. He began to move his hands over her, cupping and working her hips and buttocks, pressing her to him so that she could feel, through her flimsy dress, the points and bulges of his uniform jacket, the buttons and the folds. He began to grow hard: she felt the movement of it, inside his trousers, against her belly. An amazing thing, she thought it, even now; she’d never got used to it. Sometimes he’d move her hand to it. ‘That’s thanks to you,’ he might say, jokily. ‘That’s all yours. That’s got your name on it.’ But today he said nothing. They were both too serious. They pulled and pressed at each other as if ravenous for the other’s touch.
She was aware of the voices, still sounding fitfully in the neighbouring room. She heard someone walk, whistling a dance tune, past the door. Down in the stairwell a gong was rung, calling guests to dinner. She and Reggie kissed on, at the centre of it all, silent and more or less still, but, as it seemed to her, enveloped by a storm of motion and noise: the rushing of breath, of blood, of moisture, the straining of fabric and of skin.
She began to move her hips against his. He let her do it for a moment, then pulled away.
‘Jesus!’ he whispered, wiping his mouth. ‘You’re killing me!’
She drew him back. ‘Don’t stop.’
‘I’m not going to stop. I just don’t want to finish before I’ve started. Hang on.’
He took off his jacket and threw it down, then shrugged off his braces. He put his arms around her again and walked her to the bed, meaning to lie her down on it. As soon as they sank upon it, however, it creaked. It creaked, whichever spot they tried. So he spread his jacket out on the floor and they lay down together on that.
He pulled up her skirt and ran his hand over the bare part of her leg, beneath her buttock. She thought of the crêpe dress getting creased, her precious fairy-worked stockings snagging, but let the thought go. She turned her head, and the snowdrops tumbled from her hair and were squashed, and she didn’t care. She caught the dusty, nasty smell of the hotel carpet; she pictured all the men and women who might have embraced on it before, or who might be lying like this, now, in other rooms, in other houses—strangers to her, just as she and Reggie were strangers to them…The idea was lovely to her, suddenly. Reggie lowered himself properly upon her and she let her limbs grow loose, giving herself up to the weight of him; but still moving her hips. She forgot her father, her brother, the war; she felt pressed out of herself, released.
The waiting about, Kay thought, was the hardest part; she had never got used to it. When the Warning went, at just after ten, she actually felt better. She stretched in her chair and yawned, luxuriously.
‘I’d like a couple of simple fractures tonight,’ she told Mickey. ‘Nothing too bloody; I’ve had enough blood and guts for a while. And no one too heavy. I nearly broke my back last week, on that policeman in Ecclestone Square! No, a couple of slim little girls with broken ankles would just about do it.’
‘I’d like a nice old lady,’ said Mickey, yawning too. She was lying on the floor, on a camping-mattress, reading a cowboy book. ‘A nice old lady with a bag of sweets.’
She had just put the book aside and closed her eyes when Binkie, the station leader, came into the common-room clapping her hands. ‘Wake up, Carmichael!’ she told Mickey. ‘No snoozing on the job. That was the Yellow, didn’t you hear? I should say we’ve an hour or two before the fun starts, but you never know. How about making a tour of the fuel stores? Howard and Cole, you can go, too. And put the water on, on your way, for the bottles in the vans. All right?’
There were various curses and groans. Mickey climbed slowly to her feet, rubbing her eyes, nodding to the others. They got their coats, and went out to the garage.
Kay stretched again. She looked at the clock, then glanced around for something to do: wanting to keep herself alert, and take her mind off the waiting. She found a deck of greasy playing cards, picked them up and gave them a shuffle. The cards were meant for servicemen, and had pictures of glamour girls on them. Over the years, ambulance people had given the girls beards and moustaches, spectacles and missing teeth.
She called to Hughes, another driver. ‘Fancy a game?’
He was darning a sock, and looked up, squinting. ‘What’s your stake?’
‘Penny a pop?’
‘All right.’
She shuffled her chair over to his. He was sitting right beside the oil-stove, and could never be persuaded away from it, for the room—which was part of the complex of garages under Dolphin Square, close to the Thames—had a concrete floor and walls of whitewashed brick, and was always chilly. Hughes wore a black astrakhan coat over his uniform and had turned up the collar. His hands and wrists, where they projected from his long, voluminous sleeves, looked pale and waxy. His face was slender as a ghost’s, his teeth very stained from cigarettes. He wore glasses with dark tortoiseshell frames.
Kay dealt him a hand, and watched him sorting delicately through his cards. She shook her head. ‘It’s like gaming with Death,’ she said.
He held her gaze, and extended a hand—pointed a finger, then turned and crooked it. ‘Tonight,’ he whispered in horror-film tones.
She threw a penny at him. ‘Stop it.’ The coin bounced to the floor.
‘Hey, what’s the idea?’ said someone—a woman called Partridge. She was kneeling on the concrete, cutting out a dress from paper patterns.
Kay said, ‘Hughes was giving me the creeps.’
‘Hughes gives everyone the creeps.’
‘This time he was actually meaning to.’
Hughes did his Death-act, then, for Partridge. ‘That’s not funny, Hughes,’ she said. When two more drivers passed through the room, he did it for them. One of them shrieked. Hughes got up and went to the mirror and did it for himself. He came back looking quite unnerved.
‘I’ve had a whiff of my own grave,’ he said, picking up his cards.
Presently Mickey came back in.
‘Any sense of what it’s like out there?’ they asked her.
She was rubbing her cold hands. ‘A few wallops over Marylebone way, according to R and D. Station 39 are out already.’
Kay caught her eye. She said quietly, ‘Rathbone Place all right, d’you think?’
Mickey took off her coat. ‘I think so.’ She blew on her fingers. ‘What’s the game?’
For a time there was relative silence. A new girl, O’Neil, got out a First Aid manual and started testing herself on procedure. Drivers and attendants drifted in and out. A woman who by day was a tutor in a dancing-school changed into a pair of woollen knickerbockers and started exercising: bending, stretching, lifting her legs.
At quarter to eleven they heard the first close explosion. Shortly after that, the ack-ack started up in Hyde Park. Their station was a couple of miles away from the guns: even so, the booms seemed to rise up from the concrete into their shoes, and the crockery and cutlery, out in the kitchen, began to rattle.
But only O’Neil, the new girl, exclaimed at the sound. Everyone else simply got on with what they were doing without looking up—Partridge pinning her paper patterns a little more swiftly, perhaps; the dancing-tutor, after a moment, going off to change back into her trousers. Mickey had taken off her boots; now, lazily, she pulled them on again and began to lace them. Kay lit a cigarette, from the stub of an old one. It was worth smoking more cigarettes than you really wanted, she felt, at this stage, to make up for the frantic time to come, when you might have to go without for hours at a stretch.
There was the rumble of another explosion. It seemed closer than the last. A teaspoon that had been travelling eerily across a table, as if pushed by spirits, now flew right off.
Somebody laughed. Somebody else said, ‘We’re in for it tonight, kids!’
‘Could be nuisance raiders,’ said Kay.
Hughes snorted. ‘Could be my Aunt Fanny. They dropped photograph flares last night, I swear it. They’ll be back for the railway lines, if nothing else—’
He turned his head. The telephone, in Binkie’s office, had started to ring. Everyone grew still. Kay felt a quick, sharp stab of anxiety, deep in her breast. The phone was silenced, as Binkie picked it up. They heard her voice, very clearly: ‘Yes. I see. Yes, at once.’
‘Here we go,’ said Hughes, getting up, taking off his astrakhan coat.
Binkie came briskly into the common-room, pushing back her white hair.
‘Two incidents so far,’ she said, ‘and they’re expecting plenty more. Bessborough Place, and Hugh Street. Two ambulances and a car to the first; an ambulance and car to the second. Let’s make it’—she pointed from person to person, thinking it over as she spoke—‘Langrish and Carmichael, Cole and O’Neil, Hughes and Edwards, Partridge, Howard…All right, off you go!’
Kay and the other drivers at once went out into the garage, putting on their tin hats as they ran. The grey vans and cars stood parked and ready; Kay climbed into the cabin of hers and started its engine, pressing and easing off the accelerator pedal, warming it up. After a moment, Mickey joined her. She’d been to Binkie, to pick up the chit that would tell them more precisely what was needed and where they must go. She came quickly, hopping on to the running-board and climbing into the cabin as Kay moved off.
‘Which one did we get?’
‘Hugh Street.’
Kay nodded, swinging the van out of the garage and up the slope to the street, going slowly at first, so that Partridge, in the car behind, could catch up and follow, then putting her foot down. The van was an old commercial one that had been converted at the start of the war; she had to double-declutch with every gear change—a rather tiresome business. But she knew the vehicle and all its quirks, and went smoothly, confidently. Ten minutes before, playing cards with Hughes, she’d been almost dozy. At the ring of the telephone there had come that stab of anxiety around her heart. Now she felt—not unafraid, because only a fool would be unafraid in a job like this; but awake, alert, alive in all her limbs.
They had to go north-west to get to Hugh Street, and the route was a grim one, the shabby houses at the heart of Pimlico giving way, with dismal regularity, to patches of devastated land, to mounds of rubble, or hollowed-out terraces. The ack-ack guns still pounded on; between bursts of fire Kay could make out, too, the dreary throb of aircraft, the occasional whistle and whizz of bombs and rockets. The sounds were very like those of an ordinary Guy Fawkes night, from before the war; the smells, however, were different: not the simple-minded smell—as Kay thought of it now—of ordinary gunpowder, but the faint stink of burning rubber from the guns, and the putrid scent of exploded shells.
The streets were deserted, and lightly fogged. In raids, like this, Pimlico had an odd sort of haunted feel—the feel of having until recently swarmed with lives, which had all been violently extinguished or chased off. And when the guns stopped, the atmosphere could be even weirder. Kay and Mickey had once or twice walked along the edge of the river after their shift was finished. The place was uncanny: quieter, in its way, than the countryside would have been; and the view down the Thames, to Westminster, was all of humped, irregular masses—as if the war had stripped London back, made a series of villages of it, each of them defending itself against unknown forces, darkly and alone.
They arrived at the top of St George’s Drive and found a man—a Police Reserve—looking out for them, waiting to direct them to the site. Kay raised her hand to him, and wound down her window; he ran over to the van—ran lumpishly, because of the weight of his uniform, his hat, the canvas bag that was strapped to his chest and swung as he moved. ‘Around to the left,’ he said. ‘You’ll see it all right. Keep well out, though, because of glass.’
He ran off, then, to flag down Partridge and say the same thing to her.
Kay went on more cautiously. As soon as she turned into Hugh Street there began to come, as she knew there would, specks and smuts upon the windscreen of the van: dust, from pulverised brick and stone, plaster and wood. The light from her headlamps—which was poor enough, because the lamps were dimmed—seemed to thicken, to cloud and swirl, like stout settling down in a glass. She leant forward, trying to see, driving more and more slowly, hearing the crunch and snap of things beneath her wheels; afraid for the tyres. Then she made out another faint light, fifty yards ahead: the beam from the torch of an ARP man. He slightly raised it, hearing her come. She parked the van, and Partridge drew up behind her.
The warden came over, taking off his hat, wiping beneath it with a handkerchief, then blowing his nose. Behind him was a line of houses, dark against the almost-dark of the sky. Peering through the swirling dust, Kay could see now that one of the houses had been almost demolished, its front compressed, reduced to rubble and beams, as if under the carelessly placed boot of a roving giant.
‘What was it?’ she asked the warden as she and Mickey got out. ‘HE?’
He was putting his hat back on, and nodded. ‘Hundred pounder at least.’ He helped them get blankets, bandages, and a stretcher from the back of the van, then began to lead them over the rubble, shining his torch about as he went.
‘This place caught all of it,’ he said. ‘Three flats. The top and the middle we think were empty. But the people from the other were all at home—had been in their shelter and were just coming out again, if you can believe it. Thank God they never made it to the house! The man’s pretty cut about with glass from one of the windows. The others were all more or less knocked flying, you’ll be able to tell how badly. One old lady’s got the worst of it: she’s the one I think you’ll need the stretcher for. I told them all to keep in the garden till you arrived. They ought to have a doctor look at them, really; but Control says the doctor’s car’s been caught in a blast—’
He lost his footing, then righted himself and went on without speaking. Partridge was coughing because of the dust. Mickey was rubbing grit from her eyes. The chaos was extraordinary. Every time Kay put down her feet, things cracked beneath them, or wrapped themselves around her ankles: broken window-glass mixed up with broken mirrors, crockery, chairs and tables, curtains, carpets, feathers from a cushion or a bed, great splinters of wood. The wood surprised Kay, even now: in the days before the war she’d imagined that houses were made more or less solidly, of stone—like the last Little Pig’s, in the fairy tale. What amazed her, too, was the smallness of the piles of dirt and rubble to which even large buildings could be reduced. This house had had three intact floors to it, an hour before; the heap of debris its front had become was no more than six or seven feet high. She supposed that houses, after all—like the lives that were lived in them—were mostly made of space. It was the spaces, in fact, that counted, rather than the bricks.
The rear of the house, however, was more or less intact. They went through a creaking passageway and emerged, bizarrely, into a kitchen, still with cups and plates on its shelves and pictures on its walls, its electric light burning and its black-out curtain up. But part of the ceiling had come down, and streams of dust were tumbling from cracks in the plaster behind; beams were still falling, the warden said, and the place was expected to collapse.
He took them out to the little garden, then went back through the house to the street, to check on the neighbours. Kay put up the brim of her hat. It was hard to see, through the darkness, but she made out the figure of a man, sitting on a step with his hands at his head; and a woman, lying flat and very still on a blanket or rug, with another woman beside her, perhaps chafing her hands. A girl behind them was going dazedly about. A second girl was sitting in the open doorway of a shelter. She had a whimpering, yelping thing in her arms—Kay took it at first to be an injured baby. Then it wriggled and gave a high-pitched bark, and she saw that it was a dog.
The dust was still swirling, making everyone cough. There was that queer, disorientating atmosphere that Kay had always noticed at sites like this. The air felt charged, as if with a rapidly beating pulse—as if still ringing, physically vibrating—as if the atoms that made up the house, the garden, the people themselves, had been jolted out of their moorings and were still in the process of settling back. Kay was aware, too, of the building behind her, threatening its collapse. She went very quickly from person to person, tucking blankets over their shoulders, and shining her torch, looking into their faces.
Then, ‘Right,’ she said, straightening up. One of the girls, she thought, might have a broken leg or ankle; she sent Partridge to look at her. Mickey went to the man on the step. Kay herself went back to the woman who was lying on the rug. She was very elderly, and had taken some sort of blow to the chest. When Kay knelt beside her and felt for her heart, she let out a moan.
‘She’s all right, isn’t she?’ asked the other woman, loudly. She was shivering, and her long greyish hair was wild about her shoulders; probably she’d had it in a plait or a bun and the blast had ripped it free. ‘She hasn’t said a word since she lay down. She’s seventy-six. It’s all on account of her we were out here at all. We’d been sitting in there’—she gestured to the shelter—‘as good as gold, just playing cards and listening to the wireless. Then she said she wanted the lavatory. I brought her out, and the dog came tearing out behind us. Then the girls started crying, and then he comes out’—she meant her husband—‘with no more sense than to start running round the garden, in the black-out, like a fool. And then—honest to God, miss, it was like the end of the world had come.’ She clutched the blanket, still shivering. Now that she’d started talking, she couldn’t stop. ‘Here’s his mother,’ she went on, in the same loud, chattering, complaining way, ‘and here’s me, and the girls, with God knows how many broken bones between us. And what about the house? I think the roof’s come off, hasn’t it? The warden won’t say a word, wouldn’t let us back into the kitchen, even. I’m afraid to go and look.’ She put a jumping hand on Kay’s arm. ‘Can you tell me, miss? Are the ceilings down?’
None of them had seen the front of the house yet; from the back, and in the darkness, it looked almost untouched. Kay had been moving her hands quickly over the elderly lady, checking her arms and legs. She said now, without looking up, ‘I’m afraid there’s rather a lot of damage—’
‘What?’ said the woman. She was deaf, from the blast.
‘I’m afraid it’s hard to say, in the dark,’ said Kay, more clearly. She was concentrating on what she was doing. She thought she’d been able to feel the jut of broken ribs. She reached for her bag and brought out bandages, and began, as swiftly as she could, to bind the lady up.
‘It’s all on account of her, you know—’ the woman started again.
‘Help me with this, if you can!’ Kay shouted, to distract her.
Mickey, meanwhile, had been examining the man. His face had seemed black to Kay, at first; she’d imagined it covered with earth or soot. Once she’d shone her torch on it, however, the black had become brilliant red. His arms and chest were the same, and when she’d moved the light over him it had sent back dainty little glints. He had shards of glass sticking out of him. Mickey was trying to get out the worst before bandaging him up. He was wincing as she did it, and moving his head as if blind. His eyes were half closed, stuck together with thickening blood.
He must have felt Mickey hesitating. ‘Is it bad?’ Kay heard him ask.
‘It’s not so bad,’ answered Mickey. ‘It’s made a bit of a hedgehog of you, that’s all. Now, don’t try and speak. We’ve got to stop up those holes. You’ll never be able to drink a pint again, otherwise; it’ll all come sprinkling out.’
He wasn’t listening, or couldn’t hear. ‘How’s Mother?’ he said, over the end of her words. He called hoarsely to Kay. ‘That’s my mother.’
‘Do try and not speak,’ said Mickey again. ‘Your mother’s all right.’
‘How are the girls?’
‘The girls as well.’
Then the dust caught in his throat. Mickey held his head so that he could cough. Kay imagined his cuts reopening as he shuddered and jerked, or the glass that was still in him moving in deeper…She was aware, too, of the buzz of planes, still sounding monotonously overhead. And once there came the slithering, splintering sound of a falling roof, from a street nearby. She worked more quickly. ‘OK, Partridge?’ she called, as she tied off the bandage. ‘How much longer?’
‘Nearly there.’
‘And you, Mickey?’
‘We’ll be ready when you are.’
‘Right.’ Kay unfolded the stretcher she’d brought from the van. The warden reappeared as she was doing it; he helped her lift the lady on and tuck the blanket around her.
‘Which way can we take her?’ Kay asked him, when she was in place. ‘Is there a way to the street through the garden?’
The warden shook his head. ‘Not this garden. We’ll have to go back through the house.’
‘Through the house? Hell. We’d better go right now. Ready to lift? OK. One, two—’
As she felt herself rise, the old lady opened her eyes at last and looked about her in amazement. She said in a whisper, ‘What you doing?’
Kay felt for a firmer grip on the arms of the stretcher. ‘We’re taking you to hospital. You’ve hurt your ribs. But you’ll be all right.’
‘To hospital?’
‘Can you lie still for us? It won’t take long, I promise. We must just get you out to the ambulance.’ Kay spoke as she might to a friend—to Mickey, say. She had heard policemen and nurses address injured people as though they were idiots: ‘All right, dearie.’ ‘Now then, Ma.’ ‘Don’t you worry about that.’
‘Here’s your son coming, too,’ she said, when she saw Mickey helping up the bleeding man. ‘Partridge, are you ready with the girls? OK, everybody. Come now. Quickly, but softly.’
They trooped raggedly into the kitchen. The light made them wince and cover their eyes. And then the girls, of course, saw how filthy and cut about they were—and how dreadful their father looked, with the blood and the bandages on his face. They began to cry.
‘Never mind,’ their mother said, shaken. She was still shivering. ‘Never mind. We’re all right, aren’t we? Phyllis, turn the key in the door. Bring the tea, Eileen. And cover up that tin of corned beef! Just to be on the safe—Oh, my Lord!’ She had reached the door that led from the kitchen and seen the chaos that lay beyond. She couldn’t believe it. She stood with her hand at her heart. ‘Oh, my good Lord!’
The girls, behind her, let out screams.
Kay’s feet slid about again, as she and the warden tried to manoeuvre the elderly lady over the rubble. Every step they took sent up a new cloud of dust, feathers, soot. But finally they got her to the edge of what was once the front garden. They found a couple of schoolboys swinging from the handles of the ambulance doors.
‘Need any help, mister?’ the boys said, to the warden or, perhaps, to Kay.
The warden answered them. ‘No, we don’t. You clear off back to your shelter, before you get your bloody heads blown off. Where are your mothers? What do you think those planes are, bumble-bees?’
‘Is that old Mrs Parry? Is she dead?’
‘Get out of it!’
‘Oh, my Lord!’ the woman was still saying, as she made her way through the wreckage of her flat.
The ambulance had four metal bunks, of the kind used in shelters. There was a dim light, but no form of heating, so Kay tucked another blanket around the elderly lady and fastened her into the bunk with a canvas belt, then put one of the hot-water bottles under her knees, and another next to her feet. Mickey brought the man. His eyes were gummed shut completely now, with blood and dust; she had to guide his arms and his legs as if he’d forgotten how to use them. His wife came after. She had started picking little things up: a single tartan slipper, a plant in a pot. ‘How can I leave all this?’ she said, when the warden tried to get her into Partridge’s car so that she could be driven to the First Aid Post. She’d started crying. ‘Won’t you run and get Mr Grant from out of his house across the road? He’ll watch our things. Will you, Mr Andrews?’
‘We can’t let you bring it,’ Partridge was saying, meanwhile, to the girl with the dog.
‘I don’t want to go, then!’ cried the girl. She gripped the dog harder, making it squeal. Then she looked down at her feet. ‘Oh, Mum, here’s that picture you had from Uncle Patrick, all smashed to bits!’
‘Let her take the dog, Partridge,’ said Kay. ‘What harm can it do?’
But it was Partridge’s decision, not hers; and there wasn’t time, anyway, to stay and debate it. She left them all arguing, just nodding to Mickey in the back of the van, closing the doors, then running round to the front and wiping off the windscreen: for in the twenty minutes or so that the vehicle had been sitting idle in the street it had got thickly coated with dust. She got in the cabin and started the engine.
‘Andrews,’ she called to the warden, as she began to turn, ‘watch my tyres for me, will you?’ A puncture now would be disastrous. He moved away from the woman and the girls and shone his torch about her wheels, then raised his hand to her.
She went cautiously at first, speeding up when the road grew clearer. They were supposed to keep to a steady sixteen miles per hour when carrying casualties—but she thought of the elderly lady with her broken ribs, and the bleeding man, and drove faster. Now and then, too, she’d lean closer to the windscreen to peer up into the sky. The drone of aeroplanes was still heavy, the thumping of the guns still loud, but the sound of the engine was loud, too, and she couldn’t tell if she was driving into the worst of the action or leaving it behind.
In the wall of the cabin behind her head was a sliding glass panel: she was aware of Mickey, moving about in the back of the van. Keeping her eyes on the road ahead, she turned slightly and called, ‘All right?’
‘Just about,’ answered Mickey. ‘The old lady’s feeling the bumps, though.’
‘I’ll do what I can,’ said Kay.
She peered at the surface of the road, trying desperately to avoid the breaks and potholes, until her eyes began to smart.
When she pulled up at the stretcher entrance of the hospital on the Horseferry Road, the reception nurse came running out to greet her, ducking her head as if it were raining. The ward sister, however, followed at an almost leisurely pace, apparently quite unperturbed by the flashes and the bangs.
‘Can’t keep away from us, Langrish?’ she said, over a new burst of gunfire. ‘Well, and what do you have for us this time?’
She was large-bosomed and fair, and the wings of her cap curled into points: they always struck Kay as being like the Viking horns worn by certain opera singers. She sent for a trolley and a wheeled chair, chivvying the porters as though they were geese. And when the man who’d been cut about by glass came dazedly out of the van, she chivvied him, too: ‘Quickly, please!’
Kay and Mickey lifted out the elderly lady and set her gently on the trolley. Mickey had pinned a label to her, saying where and when she’d been hurt. She was putting out her hand as if frightened, and Kay took hold of her fingers. ‘Don’t worry, now. You’ll be all right.’
Then they helped the man into the wheeled chair. He reached to pat Mickey’s arm, saying, ‘Thank you, son.’ He’d caught a glimpse of her at the start and had thought her a boy, all this time.
‘Poor bloke,’ she said, when she and Kay had got back in the van. She was trying to wipe the worst of his blood from her hands. ‘He’ll be scarred like anything, won’t he?’
Kay nodded. But the fact was, having handed the man and his mother over safely, she was already beginning to forget them. She was fixing her mind, instead, on her route back to Dolphin Square; and she was conscious, too, of the continuing row of aeroplanes and guns. She leant forward again, to peer at the sky. Mickey peered, too, and, after a minute, wound down her window and stuck out her head.
‘How’s it look?’ asked Kay.
‘Not very clever. Just a couple of planes, but they’re right overhead. They look like they’re going round in a circle.’
‘A circle with us in it?’
‘’Fraid so.’
Kay speeded up. Mickey’s tin helmet bounced against the frame of the window; she raised her hand to steady it. ‘The searchlight’s got him, now,’ she said. ‘Now they’ve lost him. Now—Whoops.’ She drew in her head, very quickly. ‘Here’s the guns again.’
Kay turned a corner, and looked up. She could make out the beam of a searchlight and, in it, the shining body of a plane. As she watched, a line of shells rose towards the aircraft, apparently in silence—for though she could hear and feel the pounding of the guns, it was hard, somehow, to attach that clamour to the string of darting lights, or to the little puffs of smoke produced when the lights were extinguished. Soon, anyway, she was distracted by falling shrapnel. It struck the roof and the bonnet of the van with a series of clatters—as if the bombers had brought their cutlery drawers with them, and were emptying them out.
But then there was a more substantial thud, and then another; and the road ahead, suddenly, was lit by a fierce white light. The plane was dropping incendiaries, and one had burst.
‘Great,’ said Mickey. ‘What’ll we do?’
Automatically Kay had slowed, and her foot was hovering over the brake. They were meant to keep going, whatever they passed. If you got involved in some new incident, it could prove fatal. But she found it hard, every time, simply to drive away from danger.
She made a decision, and stopped the van, as close as she dared get to the spluttering cylinder. ‘I’m not going to leave this street to catch fire,’ she said, opening her door and jumping out. ‘I don’t care what Binkie’ll have to say about it.’
She looked around, saw a heap of sandbags before the window of a house, and, shielding her face and hands from the incendiary’s mad magnesium frothing, she dragged one over and let it sink. The white light disappeared. But then another bomb, farther down the street, started up. She took a second sandbag to that. The incendiaries that were only smouldering she kicked; they went out in a shower of viscous sparks. Mickey came and helped her, and after a minute a man and a girl emerged from a house and joined in, too: they all went capering up and down the street like crazy footballers…But some of the incendiaries had fallen on to roofs and into gardens, where they couldn’t get at them; one had lodged in a wooden To Let sign, which was already beginning to burn.
‘Where the hell’s your warden?’ Kay asked the man.
‘You tell me,’ he said, panting. ‘This street’s on the border of two posts. They sit there arguing about who’s supposed to patrol it. Do you think we need firemen?’
‘A couple of stirrup-pumps would do it, if we only had ladders or ropes.’
‘Shall I run to a telephone?’
Kay looked around in frustration. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I think you ought to.’
He went off. Kay turned to the girl. ‘You should get back under cover.’
The girl was dressed in a man’s teddy-bear coat, and a pixie-hood. She shook her head, grinning. ‘I like it out here. It’s more lively.’
‘Well, it may be too bloody lively in a minute. There, what did I tell you?’
There had come a bang, a sort of whump, from one of the houses farther down the street, followed by the tinkling of falling glass. Kay and Mickey ran towards it, and the girl ran after them. They found a ground-floor window with its shutters blown open and its curtains sagging on a broken rod; the curtains were black with soot or smoke, and a black cloud, with scraps of plaster in it, was billowing out, but with no sign of flame.
‘Watch out,’ said Kay, as she and Mickey got on to the window-sill and looked in. ‘It might be a timed one.’
‘I dunno,’ answered Mickey. She shone in her torch. The room was a kitchen: quite wrecked, with chairs and crockery flung about and the wallpaper scorched, and the kitchen table thrown against the wall and upended. Just beyond the table they could see the figure of a man sprawled in the chaos. He was wearing pyjamas and a dressing-gown, and was clutching his thigh. ‘Oh! Oh!’ they heard him say. ‘Oh, to fuck!’
Mickey gripped Kay’s arm. She was peering through the dust. ‘Kay,’ she said huskily. ‘I think his leg’s gone. I think it’s blown clean off! We’ll need a strap, for the bleeding.’
‘What’s that?’ called the man, beginning to cough. ‘Who’s there? Help!’
Kay turned and ran to the ambulance. ‘Don’t look,’ she said to the girl, who was hovering about outside. The drone of aeroplanes had faded, but the little fires that had been started up and down the street were taking proper hold now, the flames of them yellow, orange, red, rather than white. They would bring more planes, with real explosives, but she could do nothing at all about them. She got out a box of dressings and hurried back to the house. She found Mickey in the room with the wounded man. She had pushed back some of the mess and was ripping open the man’s pyjamas.
‘Help me up,’ he was saying.
‘Don’t try and talk.’
‘It’s just, my leg—’
‘I know. It’s all right. We need to put a tourniquet on you.’
‘A what?’
‘To keep you from bleeding.’
‘Bleeding? Am I bleeding?’
‘You must be, mate,’ said Mickey grimly.
She gave a final tug on the seam of the pyjamas and swung the beam of her torch on to the man’s bare thigh. The flesh ended a little way above the knee. The stump, however, was pink, smooth, almost shiny…‘Hang on,’ said Kay, putting her hand on Mickey’s shoulder. The man let out his breath. He began to laugh, and then to cough again.
‘Fuck me,’ he said. ‘If you find a leg on the end of that you’ll be a fucking magician. I lost that in the last war.’
The leg he was missing was a cork one. On top of that, the blast that had knocked him down had come not from a bomb, but only from a faulty gas-cooker. He’d been bending down to put a match to the ring beneath a kettle, and the whole thing had gone up. His artificial leg had been ripped from him and sent flying with everything else: they looked around and found it, hanging by one of its buckles from the picture-rail.
Mickey handed it to him in disgust. ‘As if there aren’t enough bangs going off just now, without you having to make more.’
‘I was only after a cup of tea,’ he said, still coughing. ‘A man’s entitled to his cup of tea, isn’t he?’
When they got him upright, they saw how badly shaken he was. He had burns on his face and on his hands, and part of his hair, and his brows and lashes, had been singed away. They thought they might as well take him to hospital as leave him here; they carried him out into the street and put him into the ambulance.
All around the square, fires were still burning, but the girl who’d helped extinguish the incendiaries had started banging on the doors of houses; one or two people appeared with pails of water, and pumps, and buckets of sand. The man with the artificial leg called to someone he knew, to ask him to board up the window of his flat.
‘Looks like we’re well out of here,’ he said to Kay and Mickey, watching the figures running about. ‘I hope they don’t turn their pumps on my house, though. I’d rather a fire than a flood, any day.—What’s this?’ he went on, as Kay pushed the door closed. ‘You’re not going to lock me up in this van with her, are you?’ He meant Mickey.
‘I think you’ll be all right,’ said Kay.
‘That’s what you say. You didn’t see the way she went for my pyjamas…’
‘Proper caution he was,’ Mickey said, when they’d dropped the man at the hospital.
‘Laugh?’ said Kay.
‘Honestly, though, a cork leg! If the others should find out—’
Kay tittered. ‘“Kay! Kay!”’ she said throatily. ‘“I think it’s blown clean off!”’
Mickey lit them cigarettes. ‘Get lost.’
‘Don’t mind it, dear. Anyone would have thought the same.’
‘Maybe. Still, didn’t that girl have lovely brown eyes?’
‘Did she?’
‘You never notice the dark ones.’
The guns, for the moment, had fallen silent. The plane that had dropped the incendiaries had been chased off. It was like the lifting of a weight. Kay and Mickey chatted and laughed, all the way back to Dolphin Square. But they were met in the garage by Partridge, who gave them a warning look. ‘You’re in trouble, girls.’
Binkie appeared. She had a sheaf of chits in her hand.
‘Langrish and Carmichael, where the hell have you been? You were seen heading back almost an hour ago. I was just about to call Control and report you missing.’
Kay explained about the incendiaries and the wounded man.
‘That’s too bad,’ said Binkie. ‘You’re to come straight back between jobs. You’ve been in this business too long not to know that, Langrish.’
‘You’d like me to leave a street to burn and bring more bombs? We’d have lots of jobs, then.’
‘You know the procedure. I’m warning you. You’ll do this sort of thing once too often.’
She was called back to her office by the ring of the telephone, and returned, in another moment, to send Kay and Mickey out again. The bombers had moved away from Pimlico, but there was trouble in Camberwell and Walworth. A couple of the section’s ambulances had been struck and put out of service: Kay and Mickey, and four other drivers from Dolphin Square, went over the river to take their place. The jobs were rather grisly ones. In Camberwell a house had fallen and its occupants been struck by beams: Kay had to help a doctor fix splints to a child’s crushed legs, and the child screamed and screamed whenever they touched her. In another street, a little later, two men were hit by flying shrapnel: they were so cut about, they looked as though some sort of maniac had gone at them with knives.
By quarter-past two—almost the end of their shift at the station—Kay and Mickey had been out five times. They drew into Dolphin Square, more or less exhausted. Kay switched off the engine as she turned in from the street, and let the vehicle coast down the slope into the garage under its own speed. When she tugged on the brake, she and Mickey put back their heads and closed their eyes.
‘What can you see?’ she asked.
‘Bandages,’ answered Mickey. ‘You?’
‘The road, still moving.’
Their van was now filthier than ever: they spent another quarter of an hour filling bucket after bucket with freezing water, rinsing it out and washing it down. Then they had to clean themselves off. There was an unheated room, its door marked Decontamination: Female, where they were expected to do that. The room had a sort of trough in it, and more cold water. The combination of dust and blood was terribly hard to remove from clothes and skin. Mickey’s fingers, at least, were bare. Kay wore a ring of plain gold on her smallest finger, which she never liked to take off; she had to ease it up to her knuckle to get the dirt from underneath.
When they’d done the best they could with their hands, they took off their hats. Where the straps had gripped, across their brows and under their chins, there was clean pink flesh, but the skin between was reddish-black from brick-dust and smoke, only showing lighter where they’d wiped sweat away, or in channels where water had run from their eyes. Their lashes had grit in them: they paid attention to that, because sometimes the grit contained little pieces of glass. They took it in turns to examine each other in the light: ‘Look up…Look down…Lovely!’
Kay went through to the common-room. Most of the drivers were already home. Hughes was having his hand bandaged by O’Neil, the new girl.
‘Not so tight, ducks.’
‘Sorry, Hughes.’
‘What’s up?’ asked Kay, sitting down beside them.
‘This?’ said Hughes. ‘Oh, nothing. O’Neil’s just practising.’
Kay yawned. It was always a mistake to sit before the All Clear had sounded: she felt suddenly tired to death. ‘What kind of a shift have you two had?’ she asked, in an effort to stay awake.
Hughes shrugged, his gaze on the winding bandage. ‘Not too bad. Ruptured stomach, and a lost eye.’
‘And you, O’Neil?’
‘Four broken bones in Warwick Square.’
Kay frowned. ‘That’s a music-hall song, surely?’
‘Howard and Larkin,’ O’Neil went on, ‘got a man who fell down a flight of steps, on Bloomfield Terrace. It wasn’t even blast; he was whizzed, that’s all.’
‘Whizzed!’ said Kay, liking the word, beginning to laugh. The laugh became another yawn. ‘Well, good luck to him. Anyone who can put their hands, these days, on enough booze to get whizzed by deserves a medal.’
Out in the kitchen, Mickey was making tea. Kay listened to the clink of china for a moment, then hauled herself up and went to help. They added fresh leaves to the filthy-looking black mixture that was kept, almost permanently, in the bottom of the pot; but then had to wait for the water to boil on a shrunken flame, because the gas pressure was low. The All Clear sounded just as they were pouring out, and the last of the drivers appeared. Binkie went from room to room, counting heads.
The mood of the place began to grow jolly. It was a sort of exhilaration, at having survived, got through, taken on another raid and beaten it. Everyone was streaked with blood and dust, impossibly weary from wading through rubble, from stooping and lifting, from driving through the dark; but they turned the ghastly things they’d seen and done into jokes. Kay took in the mugs, and was greeted with cheers. Partridge picked up a teaspoon and used it to fire paper pellets around the room. O’Neil had finished bandaging Hughes’s hand and started on his head. She put his spectacles back on him, on top of the crêpe.
When the telephone rang, no one grew quiet and tried to listen: they supposed it was Control, calling with confirmation of the All Clear. But then Binkie came in again. She raised her hands, and had to shout to make herself heard.
‘There’s a single ambulance needed,’ she said, ‘up at the north end of Sutherland Street. Who’s been back longest?’
‘Drat,’ said O’Neil, taking a safety-pin from her mouth. ‘That’s Cole and me. Cole?’
Cole yawned and got to her feet. There were more cheers.
‘Good for you, girls,’ said Kay, settling back.
‘Yes, cheerio, girls!’ said Hughes, pushing up the bandage from one of his eyes. ‘Splint one for me!’
‘Just a minute,’ said Binkie. ‘O’Neil, Cole’—she lowered her voice—‘I’m afraid it’s a mortuary run. No survivors at all. One body for certain, and they think two more. A mother and children. The parts are to be carried to storage. Think you can take it?’
The room fell silent. ‘Christ,’ said Hughes, letting the bandage fall back down, and drawing up his collar.
O’Neil looked sick. She was only seventeen. ‘Well—’ she said.
There was a moment’s stillness. Then, ‘I’ll do it,’ said Kay. She got to her feet. ‘I’ll partner Cole instead. Cole, you won’t mind?’
‘I won’t mind at all.’
‘Look here,’ said O’Neil. She had grown white before, but was now blushing. ‘It’s all right. I don’t want you nannying me, Langrish.’
‘No one’s doing that,’ said Kay. ‘But you’ll see enough awful things in this job, that’s all, without being made to see them when you don’t have to. Mickey, you’ll be OK with O’Neil, if another call comes through?’
‘Sure,’ said Mickey. She nodded to O’Neil. ‘Kay’s right, O’Neil. Forget it.’
‘Yes, think yourself lucky,’ said Hughes. ‘Do the same when it’s my turn, Langrish!’
O’Neil was still blushing. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘thanks, Langrish.’
Kay followed Cole out to the garage. Cole started up her van, and moved off slowly. ‘No point in rushing, I suppose…Do you want a smoke? There are some in there.’
She gestured to a pocket in the dashboard. Kay fished about inside it and brought out a flat gun-metal case marked, in nail-varnish, E. M. Cole, Hands Off! She lit two cigarettes and handed one over.
‘Thanks,’ said Cole, taking a puff. ‘God, that’s better. That was nice, by the way, what you did for O’Neil.’
Kay rubbed her eyes. ‘O’Neil’s just a kid.’
‘Still.—Hell, this engine pinks like crazy! I think the ignition’s buggered.’
They rode the rest of the way in silence, concentrating on the route. The site they wanted was back up towards Hugh Street. ‘Is this really the place?’ asked Kay, as Cole put the brake on; for the house looked fine. The damage, they found when they got out, was all in the back garden—a direct hit on a shelter. People who must recently have emerged from shelters of their own were gathered at the garden wall, trying to see. Policemen had set up a tarpaulin. A man led Kay and Cole around it, to show them what had been recovered: a woman’s body, clothed and slippered but minus its head; and the naked, sexless torso of an oldish child, still tied round with its dressing-gown cord. These lay under a blanket. Wrapped in an oilcloth sheet beside them were various body-parts: little arms, little legs; a jaw; and a chubby jointed limb that might have been a knee or an elbow.
‘We thought at first: a woman, a daughter, and a son,’ said the policeman quietly. ‘But there are, frankly—’ He wiped his mouth. ‘Well, there are more limbs than we can account for. We think now that there must have been three children, perhaps four. We’re talking to the neighbours…Do you think you can manage?’
Kay nodded. She turned, and went back to the van. It was better to be moving, doing something, after sights like that. She and Cole got stretchers: they lifted on the woman’s body and the torso and fixed labels to them with string. The limbs they wanted to keep in their oilcloth sheet, but the policeman said he couldn’t spare it. So they brought a crate, and lined it with newspaper, and put the arms and legs in that. The worst thing to handle was the jaw, with its little milk-teeth. Cole picked it up, then almost threw it into the box—overcome, in the end, not with sadness, but simply with the horror of the thing.
‘All right?’ asked Kay, touching her shoulder.
‘Yes. I’m all right.’
‘Walk about over there. I’ll see to this.’
‘I said I’m all right, didn’t I?’
They took the crate to the ambulance, labelled it up, and put it on board. Kay made sure to tie a strap around it. Once she’d carried a load like this from a mortuary to Billingsgate, where unidentified body-parts were stored. She hadn’t fastened down the crate, and when she’d opened the ambulance doors at the market a man’s head had rolled out and landed at her feet.
‘What a pissing awful job,’ said Cole, as they climbed into the van.
They got back to the station at quarter-past four. The shift had changed by then: Mickey, Binkie, Hughes—everyone had gone. The new people, not knowing where they’d been, laughed at them. ‘What’s this, Langrish? Your own shift not enough for you that you have to do ours, too?’ ‘Yes, want to stay and take my place, Langrish? Cole, how about you?’
‘We’d make a better bloody show of it than you lot,’ said Kay, ‘that’s for certain!’
She joined Cole in the wash-room. They stood side by side in silence, cleaning their hands, not catching each other’s eye. When they’d put on their coats and started to walk together towards Westminster, Cole looked up at the sky.
‘Wasn’t it lucky that the rain held off?’ she said.
They went different ways at St James’s Park, and after that Kay walked more swiftly. Her flat was north of Oxford Street, in a sort of mews or yard off Rathbone Place. She had a route to it through the little streets of Soho—a fine, quick route, if you didn’t mind, as she didn’t, the loneliness of it at this time of night, and the eeriness of so many knocked-about houses and silent restaurants and shops. Tonight she saw nobody much at all except, close to home, her warden, Henry Varney.
‘All right, Henry?’ she called quietly.
He lifted his hand. ‘All right, Miss Langrish! I saw Jerry buzzing about over Pimlico, and thought of you. Keep you on your toes, did he?’
‘Just a bit. Anything doing round here?’
‘Very quiet.’
‘That’s what we want, isn’t it? Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight, Miss Langrish. Put your ear-plugs in just in case, though!’
‘I will!’
She went on, still quickly, to Rathbone Place; only at the mouth of the mews did she begin to step more lightly—for she had a secret, persistent dread of coming back and finding that the place had been hit, was in flames or ruins. But all was quiet. Her flat was at the blank far end of the yard, above a garage, beside a warehouse; she had to go up a flight of wooden steps to get to its door. At the top she paused, to take off her jacket and her boots; she let herself in with her latchkey and passed inside very softly. She made her way into the sitting-room and switched on a table-lamp, then tiptoed to the bedroom door and gently pushed it open. With the light of the lamp she could just make out the bed, and the sleeping figure in it—the flung-out arms, the tangled hair, the sole of a foot, thrust out from underneath the bedclothes.
She pushed the door further, went to the bed, and squatted beside it. Helen stirred, opening her eyes: not quite awake, but awake enough to put up her arms, be kissed.
‘Hello,’ she said, in a blurred kind of way.
‘Hello,’ murmured Kay.
‘What time is it?’
‘Horribly late—or horribly early, I don’t know which. Have you been here all this time? You didn’t go over to the shelter?’ Helen shook her head. ‘I wish you would.’
‘I don’t like it, Kay.’ She touched Kay’s face, checking for cuts. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ said Kay, ‘I’m fine. Go back to sleep now.’
She smoothed Helen’s hair away from her brow, watching for the stilling of her eyelids: feeling the rising of emotion in her own breast, and made almost afraid, for a moment, by the fierceness of it. For she thought of the little bits of bodies she and Cole had had to collect, tonight, from the garden on Sutherland Street, and felt the ghastliness of them, suddenly, as she had not felt it then—the awful softness of human flesh, the vulnerability of bone, the appalling slightness of necks and wrists and finger-joints…It seemed a sort of miracle to her that she should come back, from so much mayhem, to so much that was quick and warm and beautiful and unmarked.
She kept watch for another minute, until she was sure that Helen had sunk back into sleep; then she rose and tucked the bedclothes around her shoulders and lightly kissed her again. She shut the bedroom door as softly as she had opened it, and went back into the sitting-room. She pulled at her tie, undid her collar-stud. When she rubbed at her neck with her fingers, she felt grit.
Against one of the walls of the sitting-room was a little bookcase. Behind one of the books was a bottle of whisky. She got herself a tumbler and fished the bottle out. She lit a cigarette, and sat down.
She was fine, for a moment or two. But then the whisky began to shiver in the glass as she raised it to her mouth, and the cigarette to shed ash over her knuckles. She’d started to shake. Sometimes it happened. Soon she was shaking so hard she could barely keep the cigarette in her mouth or sip from her drink. It was like the passing through her of a ghost express-train; there was nothing to be done, she knew, but let the train rattle on, through all its boxes and cars…The whisky helped. At last she grew calm enough to finish her cigarette and sit more comfortably. When she was perfectly steady, and sure the express-train wouldn’t come back again, she’d go to bed. She mightn’t sleep, for an hour or more. Instead, she’d lie and listen to Helen’s steady breathing in the darkness. She might put her fingers to Helen’s wrist, and feel for the miraculous tick-tick-ticking of her pulse.
It was extraordinary how still the prison could get at this time of night; fantastic, to think of the number of men who lay in it—three hundred, in Duncan’s hall alone—so quietly and without fuss. And yet it was always at about this hour that Duncan woke: as if a certain point of stillness, when reached in the atmosphere of the place, acted on him like a sound or a vibration.
He was awake, now. He was lying on his bunk, on his back, with his hands behind his head; he was gazing into the blackness made by Fraser’s bunk, a yard above his face. He felt clear-headed and quite calm: relieved of an awful burden, now that visiting-day had come and gone—now that he’d managed to get through his father’s visit without arguing or sulking, without breaking down or making a fool of himself in some way. There was a whole month, now, until visiting-day came round again. And a month in prison was an age. A month in prison was like a street with a fog in it: you could see the things that were near to you clearly enough, but the rest was grey, blank, depthless.
He said to himself, How changed you are! For he’d used to brood over all the little details of his father’s visits, for days at a time; he’d lie tormented, seeing his father’s face, hearing his father’s voice and his own—like a mad projectionist with a picture, making it play over and over. Or else he’d compose wild letters, telling his father not to come again. One time he had thrown off the bedclothes, sprung from his bunk, sat down at his table, and actually, in the near-pitch darkness, started to write a letter to Viv. He had written feverishly, with a stub of pencil, on a sheet of paper torn from the back of a library book; and when he looked next morning at what he’d done it was like the work of a lunatic, the lines all running across each other, the same ideas and phrases coming up again and again: The filth of this place—I can’t describe it—I’m afraid, Viv—the filth—I’m afraid— He’d been put on report, then, for damaging the book.
He turned on to his side, not wanting to remember it.
The moon had set, but there must be starlight: he and Fraser had drawn back the black-out, and the window—a series of ugly little panes—cast an interesting shadow on the floor. You could see it move, Duncan had found, if you watched hard enough; or you could lie looking up, with your head at a tiring angle, and see the stars themselves, see the moon, the odd sparkle of gunfire. The lights made you shiver. The cell was cold. Low in the wall beneath the window was an opening in the bricks with a piece of Victorian fretwork across it: it was meant to circulate heat, but the air that rose from it was always freezing. Duncan was wearing his prison pyjamas, his vest, and his socks; the rest of his clothes—his shirt, his jacket and trousers and cape—he’d spread on top of the blankets that covered him, for extra warmth. In the bunk above, Fraser had done the same.
But Fraser had moved in his sleep, and his cape or his shirt was hanging slightly to one side. He’d flung out his arm, too, and the fingers of his hand showed: shapely, dark, like the legs of some impossibly large and well-muscled spider. As Duncan watched, the fingers gave a twitch—as if feeling for a purchase, trying for a spring…Don’t look at it, Duncan said to himself, because he sometimes found that small, idiotic things like that could get a grip on his thoughts at night, and really unnerve him. He turned the other way, and that was better. If he stretched out his own hand now and touched the wall, he could feel where the plaster had been scratched away by men who’d lain here years before: J.B. December 1922, L.C.V. nine months ten days 1934…The dates were not old enough to be really quaint, but he liked to think of the men who had made them, and the little instruments they must have used, the stolen needles and nails, the broken bits of china. R.I.P. George K, a fine screwsman: that made him wonder if a prisoner had died in this cell, been killed, or killed himself. One man had scored a calendar, but he had given every month thirty days, so the calendar was next to useless. Another had written verses: Five lonely years I must walk my cell, I wish my wife was here as well—and underneath this someone else had put, She don’t you cunt, shes getting stuffed by your best pal ha ha.
Duncan closed his eyes. Who else, he wondered, was awake, in the whole of the building? Perhaps only the officers. You could hear them pass: back and forth they went, once every hour, like figures on an old-fashioned clock. Their shoes were soft, but made the metal landings ring: a chilly, shivering sound with a steady beat to it, like the pulsing of icy blood. You rarely heard it during the day, probably the place was too noisy then; to Duncan it seemed part of the special feel of the night, as if produced by the stillness and the dark. He would wait, to catch it. It meant another sixty minutes of prison time done, after all. And if he were the only man awake and knowing, then those sixty minutes, he felt, belonged exclusively to him: they went into his account, with a slither and a chink, like coins in the back of a china pig. Hard luck on the men who slept! They got nothing…But if someone stirred—if someone coughed, or banged on his door for an officer to come; if a man started weeping or calling out—then Duncan would share the minutes with him, fifty-fifty, thirty minutes each. That was only fair.
It was stupid, really, because of course, your time passed quickest of all when you were asleep; and lying awake, as Duncan was now, only made things worse. But you had to have little schemes, little tricks like this; you had to be able to turn your waiting into something more palpable—a piece of work or a puzzle. It was all you had to do. It was all that prison was: not a china pig after all, but a great, slow machine, for the grinding up of time. Your life went into it, and was crushed to a powder.
He lifted his head, then changed his pose again, rolled back on to his other side. The shivering sound had started up on the landing, and this time the beat was so slight, so subtle, he knew that it must be Mr Mundy who walked there; because Mr Mundy had been at the prison longer than any other officer and knew how to walk in a careful way, so as not to disturb the men. The beat came closer, but began to slow; like a fading heartbeat it came, until at last it stopped completely. Duncan held his breath. Beneath the door to his cell was a bar of sickly blue light, and in the vertical centre of the door, five feet from the floor, was a covered spy-hole. Now, as he watched, the bar of light was broken and the spy-hole, for a second, grew bright, then dimmed. Mr Mundy was standing, looking in. For, just as he knew how to walk so gently, so he also knew, he said, when any of his men were troubled and couldn’t sleep…
He stood there, quite still, for almost a minute. Then, ‘All right?’ he called, very softly.
Duncan didn’t answer at first. He was afraid that Fraser would wake. But finally, ‘All right!’ he whispered. And then, when Fraser didn’t stir, he added: ‘Goodnight!’
‘Goodnight!’ Mr Mundy answered.
Duncan closed his eyes. In time he heard the shivering beat start up again and grow faint. When he looked again, the bar of light beneath his door was unbroken, and the pale little circle of the spy-hole had been snuffed out. He rolled on to his other side, and put his hands beneath his cheek—like a boy in a picture-book, waiting patiently for sleep.